Jeremiah Golston
Chief Technical Officer, TI Streaming Media

For then next few entries, I’ll be discussing in some detail a subject that is at the forefront of digital video design and one that is near and dear to both Gene and me: high definition (HD).

It’s funny but even though I work in video and have expertise in discerning different video artifacts, I was never too concerned about the video quality at home and didn’t even buy an HDTV until last year Unlike Gene, I’m too cheap to be an early adopter when prices are still expensive.

Once I saw how stunning the quality of our HDTV with HD programming was, I was hooked. This was, of course, after I actually connected the HD ATSC input correctly - something our installer hadn’t done because he assumed we would be upgrading our satellite receiver in the next month to support HD. This meant that we weren’t actually getting HD programming on the TV from the initial install – but I digress.

Within a week my wife didn’t want to watch or record anything that wasn’t in HD and soon we were both annoyed at having to watch standard definition (SD) programs. Initially we didn’t have an HD DVR forcing us to record programs in SD. Meanwhile, our TV viewing habits had changed over the last several years to watching almost everything off the DVR because of the convenience and being able to cut down on the viewing time by skipping commercials. Forced to choose between HD and DVR, we were selecting DVR but my wife wasn’t happy. We upgraded to an HD DVR as quickly as we could and for once we did become an early adopter. Now our main issue is that, aside from the local channels which are in HD, our satellite provider has only a limited number of HD channels. This will hopefully change over the next few years as they fully deploy the new MPEG-4 AVC codec (also known as H.264) along with new satellites using DVB-S2 to increase their HD channel capacity.

What’s the point of this story? My wife and I have become HD snobs – and if we are, soon everyone will be. HD is that big.

HD displays for DTV and other applications are an important part of the digital video revolution, and video system manufacturers are faced now more than ever with decisions about implementing HD. Over my next few blog entries, we’ll discuss many flavors of HD and the challenges of making implementation trade-offs across a range of applications outside of DTV. Perhaps the most important will be actually defining what HD is as it’s proving to be a slippery term. We will also look at the factors that affect perceived image quality, the impact of HD on system cost and flexibility, which applications will benefit from HD, how to choose a media processor that can handle this cutting-edge technology, and whether designers, themselves, are HD-ready.

I’m looking forward to receiving your thoughts on this subject over the next few weeks. At that time, I hope we can all embrace our HD snobbishness.